My personal thoughts about Illumos - Solaris Rss

This is a discussion on My personal thoughts about Illumos - Solaris Rss ; There are a lot of comments on all the different kinds of social media systems and press outlets. Many got it right, some got it wrong.
At first: Illumos isn't a fork as well as it isn't a distro. It's ...

My personal thoughts about Illumos

There are a lot of comments on all the different kinds of social media systems and press outlets. Many got it right, some got it wrong.

At first: Illumos isn't a fork as well as it isn't a distro. It's a foundation. It's the leveled foundation plate to create distributions on it. It's the ON consolidation without closed source components.

Just in case, you never heard about "OS/Net" or "ON" ... you will find a good explanation at opensolaris.org:

ON (pronounced "Oh En") is the common abbreviation for the OS/Net consolidation which delivers the core Operating System and Networking components to Solaris. It contains the source for the kernel and all platforms (on all architectures), the bulk of the drivers, filesystems, core libraries, and basic commands that you'd expect to find on a Solaris system.

When you really want to call it a fork, then it's a fork of the OS/NET consolidation, not of the kernel. I think of it as a set of changes to the vanilla Solaris kernels like they exist in the Linux world (All vendors have their own kernels with modules that aren't in the mainline kernel and nobody talks about a forked Linux). However its like with the yellow press: A divorce is better for the circulation than seperated bedrooms.

Some people wrote, that Illumos reopens Solaris. Didn't knew that Oracle closed it ... all you need to get the source code is hg clone ssh://anon@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/onnv/onnv-gate that didn't changed and is what Garrett named "upstream" in his talk.

In my personal opinion Illumos is an important step for the community. It's about taking over responsibility for the operating system as a community instead of waiting for the next iso thrown over the fence. I'm looking forward to see the outcomes of this project. I hope this (or one of the other products) will create an alternative to the distributions of Oracle. Solaris deserves to have such a community. It deserves to have a community that does more than just to discuss a name of a distro ...

It's just a little bit sad, that Sun wasn't able to generate such an of acceptance of responsibility in the community in 5 years in times with an CEO at the helm widely known as "open-source to the core" minded, but now exactly this happened. Perhaps the community needed the momentary situation as a kick in the butt. History , it seems, has an interesting sense of irony ...